LinkedIn gets into the games business as the Wordle model spreads

The site has added a trio of games to its offerings for members, which all loosely follow the Wordle model that has been so successful for The New York Times.

Pinpoint, Queens and Crossclimb, the three games, can each be played once per day. Once you finish the game, you’ll be able to see metrics about your play history, including high score and daily streak. You’ll also see who in your network has played.

Results can be posted to your LinkedIn feed, a somewhat risky move for a social media network where posts are generally news- and thought leadership-related. The Microsoft-owned company hopes the game results will be conversation starters and perhaps create additional connections.

Each game takes about five minutes to complete. You can find all three titles on the LinkedIn Games page or on the site’s front page under the LinkedIn News tab. Pinpoint is a word association game. Your goal is to guess the category the words fit into using as few clues as possible. Queens is a sudoku-like game that eschews numbers and requires you to put queen on a grid in a pattern where there is just one per row and column (and they can never be in adjacent squares). Crossclimb, meanwhile, has you create a ladder of words that vary by a single letter (i.e. “lamp” and “lump”).

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is hoping the move into these sorts of games will further engage viewers and bring them back on a more regular basis.

“We want to give people a way to exercise their brains while taking a quick break, but also give people a reason to connect with others,” said Daniel Roth Editor in Chief, VP at LinkedIn, in a blog post. “We hope that these games spark banter, conversations, and even a healthy bit of competition among professionals around the world.”

There’s precedent for that. Axios reports the Times saw its games played more than 8 billion times last year, with the majority of those coming from Wordle players, which the Times acquired in 2022. Spurred by that success, other companies have been adding games to their lineup in recent years, from Vulture to Netflix.